One recurring theme you
might
garner from reading anything I’ve written is that I
strongly believe
that ‘long is wrong’. You can foster a lot of good
will from me
if you have an editor on staff who has the ability to
keep your movie
short. Particularly if your movie is going to
suck. I know
no one sets out to make a crappy movie, but it does
happen some
time. So as ‘Kickin’ it Old Skool’ was approaching
its second
full hour of running time, I started taking it
personal. On the
other hand take this little low bud hood horror film
‘April Fools’
which is a film after my own heart. Yes, it
sucked… Oh GOD did it
suck. BUT this thing struggled like hell to even
make to its
stated 70 minute running time, and that includes credits
and a couple
of lengthy ‘You Got Served’ style dance sequences which
I’m fairly
certain were choreographed by one Darrin Dewitt Henson
of ‘Darrin’s
Dance Grooves’ Fame since he’s one of the co-stars of
this film.
I will admit though I did feel every single second of
those seventy
minutes though. Every single second.

Our film opens with the
geeky
Melvin being led out to some secluded spot by the vixen
Deanna.
Melvin apparently never saw ‘Carrie’ because generally
speaking high
school hotties don’t go for geeks except to embarrass
them
greatly. Once Deanna gets Melvin’s pants around
his ankles the
other much cooler kids come out of darkness laughing and
pointing and
in unison do some infantile April Fool’s chant.
Remember the
‘School is out, Teacher wore her bloomers out
chant?’ Now do you
remember doing it after kindergarten? They
continue to
mercilessly berate poor Melvin until our eventual hero
girl Missy
(Aaliyah Franks) tells them to stop. They don’t of
course and
things get worse when the boys in our group prod the
jock of the crew
to throw his football at Melvin’s ass (Yes, he walks
around with a
football, so we know he’s a

jock). You see
Melvin has
been trying to put on his pants for the last twenty
minutes. To
prove his pinpoint accuracy, despite the fact the Melvin
is standing
only four feet away, Jock Boy Scoop hits Melvin in
the ass with
the ball sending the incredibly uncoordinated teen
crashing face first
onto a rather conveniently placed metal stake sticking
out of the
ground. This totally blows so good girl Missy says
she’s going to
call her police captain father, since nobody really did
anything
wrong. Bad Boy Diego says that’s a whack plan, a
better plan
would be to lift Melvin off the stake, drag him into the
woods and the
place three slugs in his dome thus blaming the crime on
random gang
violence. Damn if it didn’t work, though you would
think a
halfway competent Medical Examiner might be curious why
there are three
bullets in Melvin’s head as well as a huge hole from a
rusty metal
stake in spine. Oh well, you know those wacky gang
bangers.

Anyway, a year later some
freak
in a Joe Seneca mask and wielding a weird knife starts
killing off
these kids leaving crack Chicago investigators Detective
Combs
(Darrin’s Dance Grooves) and Detective Ward (Obba
Babatunde), Missy’s
father, to wonder why someone is killing his daughters
friends.
Well, the why and the what will all be revealed soon
enough causing you
to fall to your knees, and like Superman, look up at
your ceiling and
yell ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOO’!!!!!!!

‘April Fools’ wasn’t ALL
bad. Obba Babatunde and Darrin Dewitt Henson give
the film some
legitimacy and took their respective roles very
seriously. I’m
going to assume all of the hotties in this movie are all
over 18 and
they are all very cute, if not a bit light on acting
ability.
They don’t show us any skin, but Director Nancy Norman
does give us a
scene where Hip Hop Dance Diva Eva shakes her butt for
about two
minutes, with the camera staying squarely on her
butt. For like
forever. Other than that though, there’s not a
whole lot to
recommend here. The young actors struggle with
their lines, the
story – though liberally stolen – stole only the
worthless parts of
movies that weren’t that good anyway, the ending was
completely
outlandish, the camera work was spotty at best, and it
wasn’t
scary. In fact it was quite funny. I saw
another crappy
movie this same weekend, a supposed comedy called ‘The
Foursome’, and
‘April Fools’ was way funnier than that crap. The
things that
don’t make sense in this film are far too vast to go
into in this short
period of time but just chew on this; so why did our
mysterious killer
stop wearing his Joe Seneca mask and why come our hero
girl still
couldn’t identify him, why did he kill the math teacher,
and why come
the smartest kid in school still hasn’t figured out how
to put on his
pants. Moving those Dungeon and Dragon pieces
takes a large
amount of hand eye coordination you know.